"If we are lucky, mankind as it is has about 50 years left. Most of
the graphs of human development, population, ecology, technology, nuclear
proliferation and the spread of disease are on an explosive curve. The lines
shoot off the graph somewhere in the middle of the next century."

William Rees-Moog

"Today the constant presence of the cataclysm as a
possibility-indeed a probability-offers a signal opportunity for reflection
as such, and at the same time the one chance for the political rebirth that
would avert the cataclysm. A refusal to know is already part of the
disaster."

-Karl Jaspers

The Future of Mankind

"We are a civilization sunk in an unshakable commitment to genocide,
gambling madly with the universal extinction of our species. And how
viciously we ravish our sense of humanity to pretend, even for a day, that
such horror can be accepted as "normal," as "necessary."

-Theodore Roszak

The Making of a Counter Culture

"....the truth about industrialized countries is that they only seem
to appear to be true civilizations, but in fact they are not; because more
and more, at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the third millennium,
they will disregard all true love, true freedom, and true wisdom as well as
true peace along with all values of humaneness and all values of men's and
women's true being."

-Bill Meier

"As the end of the world approaches, errors increase , terrors
multiply, iniquity increases, the light, in short…is very often
extinguished; this darkness of enmity between brethren increases, daily
increases, and Jesus is not yet come."

St. Augustine (5th century)

"If a way to the better be, it lies in taking a full look at the
worst."

Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

"Don't you find it a beautiful clean though, a world empty of
people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?"

D.H. Lawrence

Women In Love

"It is said that physicians sometimes ask patients,
"Do you really wish to get well?" And, to be perfectly realistic
in this matter, we must put the question of whether modern civilization
wishes to survive. One can detect signs of suicidal impulse; one feels at
times that the modern world is calling for madder music and for stronger
wine, is craving some delirium which will take it completely away from
reality. One is made to think of Kierkegaard's figure of spectators in the
theater, who applaud the announcement and repeated announcement that the
building is on fire."

Richard M. Weaver

Ideas Have Consequences

"There is, however, such a condition as coming into
tune with the Infinite, which you can always rely upon as producing an inner
sense of utter satisfaction, of lacking nothing, of perfect
contentment....How restful and how happy to be free from the torments of
desire! Just to abide in quietude! No matter where you are, to be free of
restless desires, to be ever at ease! Here is a calm that is unbroken and
eternal, and not dependent upon the state of your finances or on the state
of the world peace, but only on the eternal reality which is ever-present
within yourself. This is true peace. The desire for constant excitement
disappears from a man into whom the quietude of the soul has entered."

Paul Brunton

Discover Yourself

"And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us."

-Henrik Ibsen

"Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only
waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything
terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from
us."

-Rainer Maria Rilke

"Fear defeats more men than any other one thing in the world."

-Elbert Hubbard

"Man himself is the crowning glory of creation."

-Gladstone

"So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity."

-Seneca

"We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars....the stars
form a circle, and in the center we dance."

-Rumi 13th century

"We are conscious in the world of today that a new spirit is abroad
to meet the challenge of a new era in the history of the world."

Louis Pauels & Jacques Bergier

Morning of the Magicians*

"Each of us literally chooses by his ways of attending to things,
what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit."

-William James

"You have set sail on another ocean

Without star or compass

Going where the argument leads

Shattering the certainties of centuries."

Janet Kalven

Respectable outlaw

"Whatever you love opens its secrets to you."

George Washington Carver

"Finally we shall place the sun itself at the center of the
Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and
the harmony of the whole universe, if only we face the facts, as they say,
‘with both eyes open."

Nicholas Copernicus

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Objects

"Man can have access to a secret world-see the Light, see
Eternity, comprehend the Laws of Energy, integrate within himself the rhythm
of the destiny of the universe, consciously apprehend the ultimate
concentration of forces and, like Teilhard de Chardin, live the
incomprehensible life that starts from ‘point Omega’, in which the whole
of creation, at the end of terrestrial time, will find its accomplishment
consummation and exaltation. Man is capable of anything. His intelligence,
equipped from the very beginning, no doubt with a capacity for infinite
knowledge, can in certain conditions apprehend the whole mechanism of life.
The powers of the human intelligence if developed to their fullest extent,
could possibly cope with anything in the Whole Universe….."

Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier

Morning of the Magicians

"Don’t mock the faith….to hell with truth! As the history of the
world proves, the truth has no bearing upon anything. It’s irrelevant and
immaterial. The life of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole
misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober."

Eugene O’Neill

The Ice Man Cometh

"I don't have to have faith, I have experience."

-Joseph Campbell

"And so the Spirit sweeps through the universe with resounding,
inspiring, and igniting power, evoking the response of renewed vitality
until the last day. This is the purpose and action of God, who has no
beginning and no end. He created humanity as the wonderful work of his hand,
by equipping people with an impulse and inclination to higher things by
enabling them to make their own responses. God did this because he loved
people. After all, he is Love itself."

Hildegard of Bingen

Liber Vitae Meritorum

"People in our day and age have just come to the edge of the shore
of the sea of tears and suffering they have yet to cross.....But only when
you sense that everything that happens to you, and is somehow connected with
you, is something that really belongs to you as a unified whole-only then
can you understand your own fate and sense its meaning: that is amor fati.
A fate we cannot transform into meaning will crush us. We must tear away the
veil from the demon who approaches us, its face hidden, and must call it by
name, exclaiming: "I know you, I know who you are-you are me!" We
are ourselves the meaning that gives life; our breath, our vision,
ourselves, and the very fact that we keep moving ahead create purpose and
patterns of meaning all around us. If our power to recognize meaning and
mystery should fail, if our imagination (in which we put our faith), our
most profound and vital faculty, is crippled-then we are lost and will
plunge like Icarus as he soared toward the sun."

Heinrich Zimmer

Heinrich Zimmer: Coming into His Own

by Margaret H. Case, ed

"Most men…can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious
truth if it obliges them to admit that a mistake might have been made."

Leo Tolstoy

"It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I
saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud;
and Marx, Darwin , and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the
Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our
world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most
anarchic violence."

William Golding

"Everything has been figured out except how to live."

Jean-Paul Sartre

"What concerns everyone can only be resolved by everyone."

-Freidrich Durrenmatt

"It is a commonplace of modern technology that the problems have
solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved."

-John Kenneth Galbraith

""One is not superior merely because one sees the world as
odious."

Chateaubriand (1768-1848)

Gurdjieff: Eventually , no matter what one starts with, one must go to
Philadelphia. After Philadelphia all roads are the same....to understand
this, they must discover true meaning of "Philadelphia." Everyone
must go to "City of Brotherly love," then all roads are the
same."

Secret talks with Mr. G.

"There is no path of wisdom, there is no path at all. There is no
journey."

Krishnamurti

"O people! Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit
of friendliness and fellowship."

-Baha'u'llah'

"Once, at ebb of tide,

I lingered

In the gloom my tea-glass fingered

Spoke to friends of Oza’s beauty and the glory of the earth;

Suddenly a talking raven

Swooped upon our sea-side haven,

With his blue-black eyes asparkle,

He retorted;

"What’s it worth?"

Andrei Voznesensky (1964)

"In the late twentieth century there is a growing awareness that we
are doomed as a species and a planet unless we have a radical change of
consciousness. The re-emergence of the Goddess is becoming the symbol and
metaphor for this transformation of culture."

Elinor Gadon

The Once and Future Goddess

"We are going to need a lot more than fig leaves to protect
us....especially now when it is becoming obvious that the enemy we face is
not a chill wind or a fire-breathing demon, but something already inside
us....It's not the devil who is to blame, but that part of us that operates
its own agenda, ruthlessly ignoring the possibility of suffering and very
real pain for the rest."

-Lyall Watson

Dark Nature

Nature is not benign…The survival of the human species is not a
preordained evolutionary program."

Joshua Lederberg (Nobel Laureate)

"You don't get offered crises, they arrive."

-Elizabeth Janeway

"Problems are messages."

-Shakti Gawain

"….schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir
up excitement; and politicians are out to get reelected. None of the three,
therefore, can do anything whatever toward saving the human race from
reciprocal suicide."

Bertrand Russell

"There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every
kind-but yet a road; and it leads to the Heart of the Universe. I can tell
you how to find those who will show you the secret gateway that leads inward
only….For those who win onwards, there is reward past all telling: the
power to bless and save humanity. For those who fail, there are other lives
in which success may come."

Madame Helena Blavatsky (May 8,1891)

"At this moment in human history the question of a higher Wisdom has
become supremely important. If it must be answered in the negative, our
chances of survival as a species for more than a hundred years are very
doubtful. We can see the difficulties ahead for the next twenty or thirty
years but assume that if we can surmount them, the Twenty-First century of
the Christian Era will see the triumph of man over nature and a world
society that will regulate human life in such a way as to eliminate poverty,
war, famine, disease, and even, perhaps, death itself. Such predictions are
indeed being confidently made by experts in "futurology". A
realistic prediction that takes account of the basic facts of human nature
leads to just the opposite conclusion. Every technological advance creates
three problems for every one it solves. Every increase in man’s power over
nature results in more destruction. Human society is not moving toward the
brotherhood of man but toward worse manifestations of human selfishness and
greed. We shall no doubt survive the twentieth century; but unless there are
great changes, few will survive the Twenty-first."

John G. Bennett

Masters of Wisdom*

Around the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate.

J.R.R. Tolkien

"....WE all dwell in a House of one Room-The World with the
Firmament for its Roof-and are sailing the Celestial Spaces without leaving
a track."

John Muir

"We reach the conclusion that many have come to: There is no way out
unless human nature can be changed."

John G. Bennett

"It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us
occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is
sand."

-madeleine L'Engle

"Whether people are beautiful and friendly or unattractive and
disruptive, ultimately they are human beings, just like oneself. Like
oneself, they want happiness and do not want suffering. Furthermore, their
right to overcome suffering and be happy is equal to one’s own. Now, when
you recognize that….you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them.
Through accustoming your mind to this sense of universal altruism, you
develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them
actively overcome their problems. Nor is this wish selective; it applies
equally to all."

Dalai Lama

"It is now clear to me that between ourselves and the inhabitants of
a madhouse there was no difference: at the time I only vaguely suspected
this, and , like all madmen, thought all were mad except myself."

Leo Tolstoy

"It is because we don’t know who we are, because we are unaware
that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally
silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so
characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by
perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by
returning to our Eternal Ground and remaining Where, without knowing it, we
have always been."

Aldous Huxley

The Perennial Philosophy

"Should I weep all day, should I howl through the night, should I
gnaw the carpet? Should I give myself airs? Or write dignified articles,
with the ponderousness of the politician or the heavy logic of the military
about the madness of our century? It is not raving madness, alas; it falls
far short of that. It is a lethargy of the soul accompanied by sententious
chatter, which reminds one of the state of the French aristocracy on the eve
of the Revolution. Everyone can see all the abuses, the impending danger,
and the incapacity of the leaders. But if one speaks of it, one provokes a
smile or an expression of vague astonishment…"

Denis de Rougemont

The Last Trump

"Look around-it's a nightmare, everything is awful, we have never
been in such a precarious position before. It's so horrific that, sincerely,
and I really mean it, if one doesn't wake up in the morning and exert
buoyancy, one could get seriously depressed."

David Bowie

(Rolling Stone Mag, aug 2002)

"We can have a world of industrial smog, diminishing diversity,
vanishing rainforests, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the lurking
hazards of genetic engineering, or we can have a world in which there are no
'environmental' diseases, no malnourished children, no warfare between
social classes, no poor. A world in which rainforests expand, oceans and
lakes teem with fish and marine mammals, new coral reefs are born, the
variety of species of life expand and the human prospect grows ever more
secure."

Global EcoVillage Network

"We must eradicate from our souls all fear and terror of what comes
toward man from the future....We must look forward with absolute equanimity to
all that may come and we must think only that whatever comes is given to us by a
world direction that is full of wisdom."

Rudolf Steiner

"Long as you’re not afraid, nobody can run your life for you.
Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be
scared. I mean that literally. " He took a bite of soggy doughnut.
"Now you know my religion."

Tom Robbins

Skinny Legs and All

"Doubt is a pain

too lonely to know

that faith

is his twin brother."

Kahil Gibran

"Each individual who conquers the panic of their nightmare, who
faces up to the terror of evil, and thereby discovers a goodness which heals
and cannot be destroyed, brings fresh love into the world. The deepening of
their capacity for love will first heal their own wound, and then go
further, spreading its gentle influence upon family and friends."

John Mack

Nightmares in Human Conflict

"Sell you cleverness and buy bewilderment;

Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition."

Jalal Uddin Rumi

"I wish that, as seekers of Bliss, which all of us are, you would
try to experience for yourselves that universal Truth which is in all and
may be felt by all. This state is not an invention of anyone. It is already
there. We have simply to discover it."

Paramhansa Yogananda

The Science of Religion

"Come, Come whoever you are, Wanderer, worshipper, lover of
learning-it does not matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if
you have broken your vow a hundred times.

Come, come again, come."

Rumi

"To work very hard like dogs and hogs for sense gratification is not
the proper ambition of human life; human life is meant for a little
austerity. We have to purify our existence; that is the mission of human
life. Why should we purify our existence? Because then we will get spiritual
realization, the unlimited, endless pleasure and happiness. That is real
pleasure, real happiness."

-A,.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami

"There are those who want to set fire to our world;

we are in danger;

There is only time to work slowly;

There is no time not to love."

Denna Metzger

"The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be
whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in
mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of
aggression and self-destruction."

Sigmund Freud

Civilization and its Discontents

"I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their
bones."

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land

"We're the rats in the cosmic laboratory."

C.S. Lewis

"Two futures beckon us. We can choose to engineer the life of the
planet, creating a second nature in our image, or we can choose to
participate with the rest of the living kingdom. Two futures, two choices.
An engineering approach to the age of biology or an ecological approach. The
battle between bioengineering and ecology is a battle of values. Our choice,
in the final analysis, depends on what we value most in life. If it is
physical security, perpetuation at all costs, that we value most, then
technological mastery over the becoming process is an appropriate choice.
But the ultimate and final power to simulate life, to imitate nature, to
fabricate the process brings with it a price far greater than any humanity
has ever had to contend with. By choosing the power of authorship, humanity
gives up, once and for all, the most precious gift of all,
companionship."

Jeremy Rifkin

Algeny

"To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various
history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual
alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms
of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random
achievements…the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design,
the blind evolution of what turns out to be great powers and truths, the
progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final
causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his
short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity…the defeat of good, the
success of evil…the pervading idolatries, the corruptions….all this is a
vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of profound
mystery, which is absolutely beyond solution. What shall be said to this
heart-piercing reason bewildering fact."

Cardinal Newman

"From what and to what can this infinite whirl be saved?"

D.H. Lawrence

"Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by
ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should
become indeed the boon-bringers, the culture hero of the day-a personage of
not only local but world historical moment.:

Joseph Campbell

Hero With a Thousand Faces

"We are now tottering on the brink of a worldwide existentialist
crisis. The existentialist dilemma is an anthropomorphic obsession over the
meaning of life when faced with the inevitability of death. This straw horse
dilemma is the logical end of western religion and its obsession with one
lifetime instead of many. And now we have to face the possibility that a
planet could self-destruct. We are paralyzed in a global existentialist dilemma. And we will self-destruct unless we look carefully at what life
really is. For just as the most honorable way out for the existentialist is
suicide, the same paradigm will apply to the planet unless we see that we
are operating from the wrong premise."

Barbara Hand Clow

Eye of the Centaur

Bear Pub, Santa Fe

:"More immediately we must demand: What is the purpose of each new
political and economic measure? Does it seek the old goal of expansion or
the new one of equilibrium? Does it work for conquest or co-operation? And
what is the nature of this of that industrial or social achievement –does
it produce material goods alone or does it make for universal society, in
which art and science, truth and beauty, religion and sanctity, enrich
mankind? Do our public life plans make for the fulfillment and renewal of
the human person, so that they will bear fruit in a life abundant: ever more
significant, ever more valuable, ever more deeply experienced and more
widely shared?"

Lewis Mumford

"But the first step is a personal one: a change in direction of
interest towards the person. Without that change, no great betterment
will take place in the social order. Once that change begins, everything is
possible."

Lewis Mumford

"It is cynicism and fear that freeze life; it is faith that thaws it
out, release it, sets it free."

Harry Emerson Fosdick

"All the scholastic scaffolding falls, as a ruined edifice, before
one single word-faith!

Napoleon

"Labour to keep alive in your breast that little celestial fire
called conscience."

George Washington

"It is clear that the immense, stupid and suicidal waste of natural
resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to
survive on this earth. The cause of the colossal squandering of riches-of
our present and future life-is the circular process of the market. The
market is highly efficient but it has no goal, its sole purpose is to
produce more in order to consume more. No civilization of the past was ever
ruled by such a blind, mechanical fatality."

Octavio Paz

"For nothing worth proving

can be proven

Nor yet disproven: wherefore

Thou be wise

Cleave ever to the sunnier

Side of doubt."

Alfred Lord Tennyson

"In short, if humanity wants to either progress or survive, we have
to become a space faring species."

Dr. Robert Zubrin

"To fulfill our cosmic destiny and carry Life to the stars, we must act
quickly. The same unleashed powers that enable us to enliven the universe are
now, ironically, causing us to destroy the Earth. The longer we delay, the
further we may slip into a pit of our own digging, If we wait too long, we will
be swept into a world so poisoned by pollution, so overrun by masses of starving
people, so outstripped of surplus resources, that there will be no chance to
ever leave this planet. Thus far, we have failed to use our new powers for the
ends they were intended. The result is an accelerating slide toward
disaster."

Marshall T. Savage

The Millennial Project

"When the heart expands and we can stretch our limbs, and feel the
new vitality everywhere, then life unfolds in us. But it needs a living
space in which it can develop. Life in the Spirit is life in the "broad
place where there is no cramping" (Job 36,16)….But how else could
"Life in the Spirit" be understood, if the Spirit were not the
space "in" which this life can grow and unfurl."

Moltmann

Spirit

"The Earth is the cradle of the mind…mankind will not remain on
earth forever, but in its quest for light and space, will at first timidly
penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later in the search for
heat and light will conquer for itself all the space near the sun."

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

The "Father of Spaceflight"

What is the destiny of man? What is the purpose of human life? If no one
knows the answers to these questions now, can we ever hope to find them? We
have searched for the answers on Earth for thousands of years without much
success. Possibly we can find them out among the stars."

Donald W. Cox James H. Chestek

Doomsday Asteroid

"The murky views which some scientists advocate as to the inevitable
end of every living thing on Earth……should not now be regarded as
axiomatic. The finer parts of mankind will, in all likelihood, never
perish-they will migrate from sun to sun as they go out. And so there is no
end to life, to intellect and the perfection of humanity. Its progress is
everlasting.:

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky

"The world faces a revolutionary Transformation . We must all learn
to communicate with one another on every topic. The true division is between
the self-satisfied specialist in every field and those restless minds in all
realms of inquiry who seek a deeper meaning of their discoverers in a more
comprehensive frame of reference."

Andrei Sakharov

"It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the
benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and unexpected
destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a
radical shift in outlook from our present naïve conception of this world as
a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive
matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially
religious, no economic or political."

Vine Deloria Jr.

"We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is
moonshine.

H.L Mencken

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

Carl Sagan

"We are all on a spaceship, and that spaceship is Earth. Six billion
passengers-and no skippers.:

Wernher Von Braun

(Bucky Fuller wrote the "operating manual for spaceship
Earth’)

"How can one deny-that all our lives hang by threads of nothing more
than luck? A vacant microbe or an oil slick on the road, an open door, the
leak in a gas line, a madman encountered by chance-against these what
matters all our painful accumulations of virtue, knowledge, nobility,
sacrifice?"

Leo Rosten

"We are …a crowd of poaching hands and mouths who out of fear have learned a safer life
than one can bear

W. H. Auden

"In sickness and in Health"

"I came to know that humanity’s greatness does not reside in the
destiny of species. Each individual is a precious, sacred entity and must be
so cherished since S/HE is related by a mysterious and structural kinship to
all of nature, to all of humanity, to the cosmos itself. Thus I found myself
in the presence of a truth that spread through me as an infinitely simple
Joy.:"

Ruth Nanda Anshen

Biography of an Idea

"And Joy shall overtake us as a flood.

When everything that is sincerely good and Perfect Divine,

With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine.

Then all this Earthy grossness quits

Attir’d with stars,

We shall for ever sit,

Triumphing over Death,

And Chance, and thee O Time."

John Milton

"Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice
between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad
humanity of which we are born a part."

E.B. White

"Now, we will have to find how best to integrate our warm fuzzy
right-brain selves into this clearly defined left-brain world. After seeding
the semantic Web with specific applications, we must leave it clean and
simple so that the next generation can learn its logical concepts along with
the alphabet. If we can make something decentralized, out of control, and of
great simplicity, we must be prepared to be astonished at whatever might
grow out of that new medium....We are forming cells within a global brain
and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes
of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually."

Tim Berners-Lee

"The legend of the earthbound spirit, for ever roaming the hiways
and waste places of the world, bears the stamp of truth, for its poetic
value is eternal. The wondering god, the disguised King, the mysterious
stranger at the wayside hearth, itinerant poet, tinker and peddler, all
those romantic figures whose appeal to our aesthetic sense is direct and
universal, represents a true archetype , the spirit of the earth."

John Mitchell

The new view over Atlantis

The powers of the earth are reasserting themselves, as if demanding that
we recognize anew the vital part they play in our existence and
welfare."

John Michell

"Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things,
man will not himself find peace."

Albert Schwietzer

"Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious,
nor giving your life away to the ignorant and the common….Live! Live the
wonderful Life that in you."

Oscar Wilde

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure , or it is nothing."

Helen Keller

"The condition of lovelessness is the cause of suffering for
the entire human race."

Wagner

"Unless there is a sisterly-brotherly feeling in your hearts, all
the words that you speak or print in my name are hollow; all the miles that
you travel in my cause are zero; all organization for my work are but an
appearance of activity; all buildings to contain me are empty places and all
statues that you make to embody me are of someone else"

Meher Baba

"We are not kept alive by legislators and militarists, that’s
fairly obvious. We are kept alive by men of faith, men of visions. They are
like germs in the endless process of becoming. Make room, then, for the
life-giving ones!"

Henry Miller

"Believe no more! Hope no more! Pray no more! Open wide your eyes.
Stand erect. Cast out all fear. A new world is about to be born. It is
yours. From this moment all will change. What is magic? The knowledge that
you are free. You are free! Sing! Dance! Fly! Life has just
begun."

Henry Miller

:"If you judge people, you don’t have time to love them."

Mother Theresa

"We are the curators of life on earth; we hold it in the palms of
our hands. Can we evolve spiritually and emotionally in time to control the
overwhelming evil that our advanced and rational intellect has created? We
will know the answer to this question in our lifetime. This generation will
die having discovered the answer."

Dr. Helen Caldicott

Missile Envy

"Yes, something momentous is about to happen, But one thing I’m
not sure of: will it happen to me alone, or will it also happen to the rest
of the world.?

Byron

"If men understood each other, they will become as it were one race,
one people, one household, one School of God….and then thee will be
Universal Peace over the whole World. Hatred and the causes of hatred will
be done away, and all dissension between men. For there will be no grounds
for dissenting when men have the same Truths clearly presented to their
eyes."

Comenius 1668

The way of light

"Today our plans miscarry because they are in the hands of people
who have undergone no inner growth."

Lewis Mumford

"What is life? A bone thrown to a company of hungry curs; a bait for
greedy fishes; the painfulness and continual burden-bearing of wretched
ants, the running to and fro of mice: little puppets drawn up and down with
wires and nerves: These be the objects of the world."

Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome)

"Only you yourself can be your liberator."

Wilhelm Reich

"Is there a pattern in all this? Or just a series of charades en
route to nothingness? All the follies and cruelties, the lusts, the
betrayals-were they sign-posts on the path to peace and salvation? Or were
they merely the wild gesticulations of a madman?"

Frederic Prokosch

The MissoLonghi Manuscript

"
By a high Star our course is set

our end is life. Put out to sea."

Louis Macneice 1907-1963

"Should we not give a spiritual basis to the world which is now
being mechanically made to feel its oneness by modern scientific
inventions?"

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan 1939

"We are living in times that have no precedent, and in our present
situation, universality…has to permeate our language and the whole of our
way of life. Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint…"

Simone Weil 1942

"We’re all in this alone."

Lily Tomlin

"Just like legs take the man away from the cold and dark, towards
lodging and light, word, art and literature help the man in his pursuit from
the past through to the future."

Vladimir Korolenko

"You’re catching on, my friend. We’re nothing but a little blue
spot in a solar system, in a galaxy with a hundred million solar systems, in
a universe with a hundred million galaxies. And the truth is we don’t know
where it ends, or if it does. And we aren’t even talking about dimensions
yet. Gives you a headache, doesn’t it?"

David Morehouse

Psychic Warrior

"It might turn out that exploring the far-out spaces of human
consciousness is the fastest way to social transformation."

John C. Lilly

"Since the development of life means the rise and growth of
consciousness, that development could not continue indefinitely along its
own line without a transformation in depth: like all great developments in
the world, life had to become different in order to remain itself."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as
inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the
will or the vision to demand that which is good?"

Rachel Carson,

Silent Spring

"If we are going to save the world – that is, restore the
biosphere and save ourselves as a species – we will have to develop and
live by new rules. Only through the recognition and enforcement of world law
can our basic rights be protected and the war making of the nation-states be
stopped."

Garry Davis

"Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s this day-to-day living that
wears you out."

Anton Chekhov

"Last, but by no means least, courage – moral Courage, the courage
of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a
constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle – the
roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the
other."

General Douglas MacArthur

"From the stars to the earth’s center, in the external world and
within ourselves, every substance is unknown to us. We see appearances only;
we are in a dream."

Voltaire

"For a very long time people mocked at occult causes. We should
rather ridicule those who doubt them…Vegetables, minerals, animals, where
is your first principle? It is in his hand who made the sun turn on its axis
and clothed it in light…What corpuscular physics, what atoms determine the
nature (of the elements)? You know nothing. The reason will forever be
occult, so far as you are concerned. All that surrounds you, all that lies
within you, is an enigma whose key it is not given to man to discover."

Voltaire

"Whatever happens, good or bad, when you look closely, you’ll find
that it is all for the best."

Babur,

Prince & Emperor 1506

"The danger facing us is unlike any danger that ever existed. We
cannot leave it to Generals, Senators and diplomats to work out a solution
over a period of generations. Today lack of interest would be a great
danger, for there is much the average man can do."

Albert Einstein

"The enemy is a man who not only believes in his won helplessness
but actually worships it. His main article of faith is that there are
mammoth forces at work which the individual cannot possibly comprehend, much
less alter or direct…The enemy is a man who has a total willingness to
delegate his worries about the world to officialdom. He assumes that only
the people in authority are in a position to know and act."

Norman Cousins

Checklist of Enemies

"Become who you are."

Neitzche

"There is a time for Buddhist mediation, and there is a time for
Irish whiskey."

Joseph Campbell

"All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of actual
life springs ever green."

Goethe (1749-1832)

"Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as
inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the
will or the vision to demand that which is good?"

Rachel Carson

Silent Spring

"The possibility of realizing our destiny depends upon a force that
is not our won and that has its origin on a much higher level than the
human. Therefore, everything for us really depends upon the possibility of
coming into contact with that great Force."

J.G. Bennett

"Let us try to celebrate and enjoy ourselves. I am really only
interested in trying to entice people with all the skills at my disposal to
live in sort of way if they possibly can."

R.D.Laing

"The way of a superior man is threefold; virtuous, he is free from
anxieties; wise he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from
fear."

Confucius

"And whether we are preparing a new birth of spirit or the agonies
of final dissolution depends on what you think, feel, and will about such
manifestations or apparitions, on the Kabbalistic skill you develop in the
interpretation of these contemporary formations."

Saul Bellow

Cousins

"The universe is not dead. Therefore, there is an Intelligence
there, and at least one purpose, (possibly the major purpose), of that
intelligence is the achievement of universal harmony. Striving in the
direction of peace and harmony, as well as the achievement of it, is the
result of accord with that Intelligence.

If I had never seen a watch and should see one for the first time, I
should be sure its hands were moving according to some plan and not at
random. Nor does it seem any more reasonable for me to conceive that the
precision and order of the universe is the product of blind chance. This
whole concept is summed up in the word ‘harmony’. For those who seek it,
there is inexhaustible evidence of an all-pervading Intelligence."

Rear-Admiral Richard Byrd

(notes made while alone for five months in the Antarctic)

"Everything is here, you know, very orderly, very beautiful and
nice. There’s a lot of authority and guidance coming from a source. That’s
all we know."

Jose Rey Toledo

"In our Pueblo life, during the winter solstice and what was to be
the beginning of the new year, we always drew on the walls figures of
prayer-prayer symbols like deer, horses, turkey, eagles, the planets,
morning star, evening star – these things that guided us, and gave us, and
nurtured us in our lives, and crops like chili, melons, you know to
symbolize a request to the spiritual world for many of those things that
might grow plentiful during the year."

Jose Rey Toledo

"Although the origins of man are more obscure than they ever were
and the mysteries of life grow more unfathomable the farther we progress in
the exact sciences, at least we confront the earliest tokens of human
existence with more humility than our great-grandfathers did a hundred years
ago. At least we perceive the unique and extraordinary nature of mankind
more clearly than all the generations before us and recognize the enigma of
man’s origin lies no less on the physical than on the spiritual plane. No
longer shrinking from the assumption that these is a creative force of that
behind all the secrets of existence stands a supreme being, we are daily
drawing nearer to God."

Iven Lissner

Man, God and Magic

"I have lived. This is to have succeeded."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The great end of life is not knowledge but action."

Thomas Henry Huxley

"The world, in incredibly dark and devious ways is headed toward
Salvation."

Edward R. Murrow 1950

"…how much more delightful to an undebauched mind is the talk of
making improvements on the earth, than all the vain glory which can be
acquired from ravaging it, by the most uninterrupted career of
conquests."

George Washington

"…a conspiracy to coexist with the crab Nebula, the exploding
Universe, the Mind."

Adrienne Rich

"Solutions are difficult, for our decay has engendered cynicism, and
our first response to every suggestion is a disillusioned smile. By a kind
of olfactory adaptation we have come to believe that the world has always
been this way, and will always be; we seem quite reconciled, now that we are
so intelligent, to be ruled by wolves and geese."

Will Durant 1929

"Underneath all, individuals;

I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,

The American compact is altogether with individuals,

The only government is that which makes minute of individuals,

The whole theory of the universe is directed to one single individual –
namely to You."

Walt Whitman

"For I do not see one imperfection in the universe;

And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the
universe."

Walt Whitman

Nothing is too wonderful to be true."

Michael Faraday

(1791-1867)

"The mind of man – how far will it advance? Where will its daring
impudence find limits? If human villainy and human life shall wax in due
proportion, if the son shall always grow in wickedness past his father, the
gods must add another world to this that all the sinners may have space
enough."

Euripides 428 B.C.

"…how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief."

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Tenth Elegy 1923

"Judging by what I have learned about men and women, I am convinced
that far more idealistic aspiration exists than is ever evident. Just as the
rivers we see are much less numerous than the underground streams, so the
idealism that is visible is minor compared to what men and women carry in
their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released. Mankind is waiting and
longing for those who can accomplish the task of untying what id knotted and
bringing the underground waters to the surface."

Albert Schweitzer

"Something we were withholding made us weak until we found out it
was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living, and forthwith
found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves
outright."

Robert Frost

(read at JFK inauguration)

"…To picture Jesus and Muhammad and the Buddha and others
competing for a prize for their contribution to ‘progress in religion’
is at once to see the absurdity of the suggestion. Jesus’ own message
centered on the coming Kingdom of God. For those who follow Jesus, the
longing and indeed daily prayer is that God’s kingdom will come on earth
as it is in heaven. Jesus defined that Kingdom as good news for the poor,
release for the prisoner, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the
victims of cruelty. The ultimate picture and hope is of a world at peace, a
world of justice, where all share God’s gift of abundant life. It is not,
despite well-known hymns with splendid tunes, a coronation ceremony."

Reverend Marcus Braybrooke

Chairman of the World Congress of Faiths

"We should honor the great of all nations and cultures. It is a kind
of universal ancestor worship, not just a communion of saints, but a
communion of great achievers."

Professor Ninian Smart

Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara

"It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but
rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and
mankind its citizens."

Baha U’llah

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the
limits of the world."

Schopenhaurer

"The Brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream: it is a most
depressing reality."

Oscar Wilde

"Why roam in the far yonder? Look, the good is so near at
hand!"

Goethe

"The first duty for a man is still that of subduing fear. We must
get rid of fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man’s acts are slavish,
not true but specious, his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave
and coward, till he have go fear under his feet. Odin’s creed, if we
disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour."

Thomas Carlyle 1840

"We are the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of
God. We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we may
feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so."

Thomas Carlyle 1840

"There is no way back into the past. The choice is the Universe or
nothing."

H.G. Wells

"This will of God which we were all the Angels, that is, the Rays,
you see that very few of us still are, because too much Evil has passed over
us. The War between Evil and God is not yet over and if the Kingdom of God
is to come to earth we must be chaste. We are as Chaste as possible. But
people all over the earth are no longer chaste at all. And the time has come
for them to return to complete chastity."

Told to Antonin Artaud

by the Tarahumara Indians (1936 Mexico)

"Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have
"thought globally’ (and among them the most successful have been
imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means
of simplification too extreme and oppressive to merit. The name of thought.
Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people. National thinkers
tend to be dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern
United States who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump."

Wendell Berry

"The All-Knowing Physician hath His finger on the pulse of mankind.
He perceiveth the disease, and prescribeth, in His unerring wisdom, the
remedy. Every age hath its own problem…The remedy the world needeth in its
present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age
may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in,
and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements."

Baha u’llah

For Gen X, the lyrics of Alanis Morissette’s Hand in My Pocket defines
the guarded hopefulness of the new generation:

I’m broke but I’m happy, I’m poor but I’m kind…

I’m lost but I’m hopeful baby, What it all comes down to

Is that everything’s gonna be fine, fine, fine

I’ve got one hand in my pocket, And the other one is giving a high
five.

"We’ve been assuming all along that failure was certain, that our
universe was running down and it was strictly you or me, kill or be killed
as long as it lasted. But now, in our century, we’ve discovered that man
can be a success on this planet, and this is the great change that has come
over our thinking."

R. Buckminster Fuller

"Compose your differences, and reduce your armaments, that the
burden of your expenditures maybe lightened, and that your minds and hearts
may be tranquillized. Heal the dissentions that divide you, and ye will no
longer be in need of any armaments except what the protection of your cities
and territories demandeth."

Baha u’llah

"One must be an individual, sane, and balanced, not belonging to any
race, country or to any particular ideology. Then perhaps sanity and peace
will come back to the world."

Krishnamurti

"Life is an exciting business and most exciting when it is lived for
others."

Helen Keller

"In the long run men hit only what they aim at."

Thoreau

"The problems that will plague millennial man requires that we
restore the idea of evil, the idea of the sacred to the center of political
life."

Jacques Attali

"Listen oftener

To things than beings,

For the voice of Fire is heard,

Listen to the voice of the Water,

Listen in the wind to the crying bush,

It’s the breath of ancestors."

Birago Diop

"…We are not in control. As societies grow more populous and
complex, the idea that a global elite like the UN can engineer reality from
above is just as absurd as the idea that political ‘scientists’ can
reduce any of this to a science.

Robert D Kaplan

The Ends of the Earth

"The long-range future may be bright, but the next few decades will
be tumultuous. Keep in mind that the collapse of just a few small countries
scattered around the globe has overwhelmed policymakers in the West. Were a
major regional power to dissolve somewhere, we would have no answers.
Americans, because our own history, tend to see optimistic scenarios in
places where endings have rarely been happy. But the banal truth is that
economic and social development is generally cruel, painful, violent, and
uneven – and humanity is developing more dramatically than ever
before."

Robert D. Kaplan

"And other spirits…are standing apart upon the forehead of the age
to come; these, these will give the world another heart, and other pulses.
Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings? Listen awhile ye nations, and be
dumb."

Keats

(from the poem "addressed to Haydon")

"More power and more knowledge exalt human nature but do not bless
it. We must gather from the whole store of things such as make most for the
uses of life."

Francis Bacon

The Advancement of Learning

"Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without
it."

Pearl Buck

"The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life,
like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only
courageous thing left to do."

E.V. Lucas

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my
love for truth; and truth rewarded me."

Simone De Beavoir

"A curse on every wish that blinds the sight, paralyzes the tongue,
cramps the hand, and prevents the truth being seen, said, and written."

Theodor Haecker

"As to God, open your eyes – and your heart, which is also a
perceptive organ – and you see him."

Charles Sanders Peirce

"Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of
insignificance."

Alfred North Whitehead

"Let here begin a Brotherhood of man, wherein the West shall freely
meet the East, and man greet man as man."

Hu Shih

Written at Cornell University 1915

"People’s lives are in turmoil. There is a sense of crisis for men
as well as for women, and for children too. Do we have an idea or even a
glimmering about how people can and should live, not as victims as in the
past for women, nor as atoms just whirling around on their own trajectories,
but as members of a human community and as moral agents in that
community?"

Barbara Ehrenreich

"Some say, after we have mastered the wind, the waves, the tides,
and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the
second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered
fire."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"Ring out old shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust
for gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of
peace.

Alfred North Tennyson

Collected Works

"Etana looked down and saw the earth had become like a hill and the
sea like a well. And so they flew for another hour, and once again Etana
looked down: the earth was now like a grinding stone and the sea like a pot.
After the third hour the earth was only a speck of dust, and the sea no
longer seen."

Flight of Etana

Written in Babylon 4,700 years ago

"This world is a terrible place; there is no safety here. But what
are we to do? We must stop taking life so seriously…"

Paramahansa Yogananda

"We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only though our
love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re
not alone."

Orson Welles (1915-1984)

"We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own
skins, for life!"

Tennessee Williams (1914-1983)

"So don’t be attached to the passing dreams of life. Live for God
and God alone. This is the only way to have freedom and safety in this
world. Outside of God there is no security; no matter where you go, delusion
can attack you. Be free right now. Be a son of God now; realize you are His
child, so that you may be rid of this dream of delusion forever."

Paramahansa Yogananda

The Divine Romance

"You have nothing if you have not God. You have everything if you
have God; for he is the Master of the Universe."

Paramahansa Yogananda

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And to know the place for the first time."

T.S. Eliot

"And so it all comes down to the same thing in the end, whether we
start with the technological fantasies of Herman Kahn, the mysticism of
Edgar Cayce or the cosmic fictions of Arthur C. Clarke. Western Civilization
is drawing to a close in an age of apocalyptic turmoil in which the old
species, collectivizing mankind with machines, and the new species, unifying
it in consciousness, are in collusion with one another to end what we know
as human nature. Western man will no doubt try to prove that he is not
merely mud to be shaped into bricks for the dreamers’ temples, but even
taking the conservative obstinacy of industrial man into account, it would
still seem that we are at one of those moments when the whole meaning of
nature, self, and civilization is overturned in a re-visioning of history as
important as any technological innovation."

William Irwin Thompson

"In that hour, weary of life, men will no longer regard the world s
a worthy object of their admiration and reverence. This all which is a good
thing, the best that can be seen in the past, the present and future, will
be in danger of perishing; men will esteem it a burden; and thence forward
they will despise and no longer cherish the whole of the universe,
incomparable work of God, glorious construction, good creation made up of an
infinite diversity of forms, instruments of the will of God who, without
envy, pours forth his favour on all his work, in which is assembled in one
whole, in a harmonious diversity, all that can be seen that is worthy of
reverence, praise and love. For darkness will be preferred to light; it will
be thought better to die than to live; none will raise his eyes towards
heaven; the pious man will be thought mad, the impious wise; the frenzied
will be thought brave, the worst criminal a good man. The soul and all the beliefs attached to it, according to which the soul is immortal by nature or
forces that it can obtain immortality as I have taught you – this will be
laughed at and thought nonsense."

Asclepius

Translated by Marsilio Ficino

"Only the mistakes are ours. In this world, beauty is common."

Jorge Luis Borges

"Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to
death."

The Upanishads

"The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the
powers latent in man. The game can be played only by people whose
observations of themselves and others have lead them to a certain
conclusion, namely, that man’s ordinary state of consciousness, his
so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which
he is capable. In fact, this state is so far from real awakening that it
could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of ‘waking
sleep.’"

Robert S. DeRopp

"he who, being a man, remains a woman, will become a universal
channel."

-Lao-Tze

"No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a
great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of
thought."

John Stuart Mill

"God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is
running out."

Arthur Koestler

"I decline to accept the end of men….I believe that man will not
merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit
capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.."

William Faulkner

(acceptance speech for Nobel Prize in Literature 1949)

"The meaning of victory is not this, that anyone should fight or
strive with another....That which God-glorious is His mention-has desired
for Himself is the hearts of His servants, which are treasures of praise and
love of the Lord, and are stores of divine knowledge and wisdom....Today
victory neither has been, nor will be , opposition to anyone, nor strife
with any person; but rather, what is well-pleasing is that the cities of
men's hearts, which are under the dominion of the hosts of selfishness and
desire, should be subdued by the sword of the word of wisdom and
exhortation. Everyone then who desires victory must first subdue the city of
his own heart with the sword of spiritual truth and of the Word, and must
protect it from remembering aught but God; afterwards let him turn his
efforts towards the citadel of the hearts of others. This is what is
intended by victory. Sedition has never been, nor will be pleasing to God,
and that which certain ignorant persons formerly wrought was never approved
by God. If you are slain for His good pleasure, verily it is better for you
than that you should slay."

Baha'u'llah

Do all the good you can

By all the means you can,

In all the places you can,

At all the times you can,

As long as ever you can.

John Wesley

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn,
but to unlearn.

Gloria Steinem

"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do."

Henry David Thoreau

"I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed."

Nietzsche

"Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and
grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray
when the sun shines."

Satchel Paige

"I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones."

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land (1922)

"Astonishing! Everything is intelligent."

Pythagoras

"-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and we are standing
now, quietly in the new life?"

Juan Ramon Jiminez

"I’d like to lie down somewhere in a cool, dark corner, and weep.
What are people doing with their lives? What are they doing?"

Robert Sund

"We can’t just sit here waiting for Armageddon."

Barbara Marx Hubbard

"Don’t hate, it’s too big a burden to bear."

Martin Luther King Jr.

"Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; all just supply, and all
relation."

John Donne

"Only Connect!"

E.M. Forster

"The earth does not need more humans, but perhaps it needs better
humans, humans more disease-resistant, genetically superior, more
intelligent, sympathetic, moral, and spiritual, better adjusted to and able
to cope with their environment. With our rapidly increasing knowledge about
the human microsphere and our developing technology, we stand in a position
to improve our progeny."

V. Elving Anderson

On Behalf of God

"Sooner or later man will be forced to decide whether to abandon his
body or his life. After all it is the brain that counts."

J.D. Bernal

"If the body isn’t sacred-what is?"

Walt Whitman

"The end then of learning, is to repair the ruines of our first
parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love
Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him."

John Milton

"If man is Alpha and Omega, then it is profoundly important for
religious reasons that we travel to other worlds, other galaxies; for it may
be Man’s destiny to assure immortality, not only of his race but even of
the spark of life itself….By the grace of God, we shall in this century
successfully send man through space to the moon and to other planets on the
first leg of his last and greatest journey…."

Werner Von Braun

"Women, designed by evolution as the link between spirit and flesh,
are perhaps also designed by the cosmos to lead the human world back, now,
to the great celebration of the reconciliation of flesh and spirit. Thus, at
the very edge of death, we will return to the beginning. That is, at the end
of the world (where we must surely be) we will return to the Goddess, the
Great Mother of All life, as her magic children. In a round world, the only
way for human beings to survive the end is to return to the
beginning. Thus we complete a circle; but on a spiral, we revolve to
a larger circle."

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother

"Our bodies are not final. We are moving, all of us, in our common
humankind, through the forms we love so deeply in one another, to what our
hands have already touched in one another, to what our hands have already
touched in love-making and our bodies strain for in each other’s darkness.
Slowly, and with pain, over centuries, we move an infinitesimal space
towards it. We are creating the lineaments of some final man, for what
delight we have prepared in landscape, and who can only be as god."

David Malouf

An Imaginary Life

"We are on the verge of the next stage in life’s evolution, the
stage where, by human agency, life takes control of itself and guides its
own destiny. Never before has human life been able to change itself, to
reach into its own genetic structure and rearrange its molecular basis; now
it can. Perhaps we are already in the last few generations of our embodiment
as carbon-based life forms. What is relatively certain is that we are about
to enter the Transition period between the human and the posthuman eras-the
transhuman age."

Christopher Dewdney

Last Flesh

"In John, you start out with the word, the word becomes flesh, what
we’re in the process of doing is making the flesh back into word."

John Perry Barlow

"We need a new human in a new Earth, creating and entering new
relationships with the primary realities of the universe. In the most
obvious meaning, all our difficulty as a species on this planet stems from
our false relationships with winds, seas, life, sunlight, and land. It’s
not that we’re bad; we’ve simply been trying to live outside our True
relationships with these primordial cosmic presences."

Brian Swimme

The Universe is a Green Dragon

"The manifest destiny of mankind is to pass the torch of life and
intelligence on to the computer."

Rudy Rucker

"If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will
be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are
opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to
making a better world. That’s your choice."

Noam Chomsky

On Human Freedom

"Who are the Turks? There may be few more important questions for
the early twenty-first century.:

Robert Kaplan

"We are entering upon the spiritual era of mankind when peace and
plenty shall cover the land, even as mother-love enfolds the babe."

Joel S. Goldsmith

Infinite Way Letters

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;
therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or
good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we
must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished
alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous
from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.
Therefore we must be saved by the final favor of love which is
forgiveness."

Reinhoold Niebuhr

The Irony of American History

"But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes
were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and
massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties
whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be
played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into
battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle
of man is not how far he as sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are
known among the stars by our poems and not our corpses."

Robert Ardrey

"Either we have hope within us or we don’t, it is a dimension of
the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular
observation of the world or estimate of the situation….Hope, is this deep
and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well or
willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early
success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good,
not just because it stands a chance to succeed….Hope is definitely not the
same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn
out well, but the certainty that something makes sense no matter how it
turns out.:

Vaclav Havel

"A world of nation-states is essentially a lawless,
anarchic world in which conflict is the defining political and social force.
For the nation, "national security" is another word for
repression. War is a way to protect the "common welfare," often by
destroying it. Environmental degradation is defined as merely a "trade
off" for progress. And "human services," managed by
government and dominated by a repressive ethic, are programs that quite
often promote moral and social disintegration. Leaders are commonly liars
and criminals; commercial institutions are machines that market violence for
profit. In the nation-state, the social contract called "national
citizenship" becomes a collective suicide pact. We simply don't know
when we'll be asked to die-or for what."

Garry Davis

Passport to Freedom

"One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

Einstein

"The question is as follows: which will prevail within us, determine
our relations to life, to reality? The civilization, the tradition in which
we grew up, or the faith, the ideology that we possess and profess."

Ryszard Kapuscianski

Imperium

"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old
ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every
corner of our minds."

-John Maynard Keynes

"From the tireless labyrinth of dreams I returned as if to my home,
to the harsh prison. I blessed its dampness, I blessed its tiger, I blessed
the crevice of light. I blessed my old, suffering body. I blessed the
darkness and the stone. Then there occurred what I cannot forget or
communicate. There occurred the union with the divinity, with the
universe."

Jorge Luis Borges

"All too often we tend to think of the world as being governed by
natural laws which are independent of God. But perhaps the old Hebrew
conception is nearer the truth, that the world is a sphere in which God can
directly act at any time and in which he does act."

John Bright

The Interpreters Bible

"And so we have arrived on the threshold of the crux of the
matter-power. We are at the end of the Piscean Age for which the Crucifixion
is still the most potent symbol. Christ started it as the Master who
attained his full potential reach into matter and was put on a cross for it.
He was followed by two thousand years of searchers who are now in
incarnations again after two thousand years of experience being garroted,
burned at the stake, hands and genitals cut off, and lately radiated with
atomic weaponry. Does anybody think we’ve had enough? Isn’t it about
time to enter the places of pain to find our power? There is no question
about it any more. It is a matter of survival."

Barbara Hand Clow

The Eye of the Centaur

"What does it all mean? This is what it all means. To the extent
that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere
alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent, that we banish the
rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time, and if we
should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our
ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discussion in the
name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient
heritage, we will become nothing."

Edward O Wilson

Consilience

"Mundialization is, essentially, a grass roots
movement for world citizenship. The word is derived from the latin word for
world-mundis. For a place to become "mundialized" means to become
"worldly." to adopt a holistic world view. It means social
maturation, a process involving balance and coordination. "

(Many Cities all over the world have been Mundialized)

"Give it to soup lines

If I see someone who needs some

Here’s a hundred. Here’s fifty.

Soup vendor. Wino. Old woman with varicose veins.

Good deeds. Judgment,

I’m well pleased with you my son. Come into heaven.

That’s eternal life. Maann! Maaann!

Look at all the buildings in downtown New York.

People built them. They’re dead.

Buildings still standing.

You don’t own nothing;. Just a trustee.

This life’s a test. A test

Trying to pass the test. I’m trying’.

Warm bodies. Shake hands. Gone.

All dead now. President Kennedy.

Whatever color you are

No matter how much money you have

Politics. Sports. You’re gonna die.

Sleep is the brother of death.

Muhammed Ali

"Brethren, I remind you this (death) is the end of all compounded
things."

Last words of Gautama Buddha

"For in and out, above, about, below

Tis nothing but a ,magic shadow show."

Omar Khayyam

"Whatever you can do , or dream you can do, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."

Goethe

"There is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is
guided,-the race never dying, the individual never spared,-to results
affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius, or
Destiny, is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their
calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without
their designs. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that
love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things,
literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich
treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."

Henry Miller

"Listen to the call of this art, this philosophy, this unheard of
politics: My people, wherever you come from, you who have been swept along
on the great wave of deterritorialization, you who have been grafted to the
hyperbody of humanity and whose pulse echoes its powerful heartbeat, you who
think reunited and dispersed throughout the hypercortex of nations, or live,
captive, torn asunder, within this immense in a world that continuously
doubles back and recreates itself, you have been thrown alive into the
virtual, overtaken by our specie’s great leap into the headwaters of
being, known that in the very heart of this strange maelstrom, you are at
home. Welcome to humanity’s new home. Welcome to the virtual."

Pierre Levy

Becoming Virtual

:"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night."

Crow Foot

Blackfeet Tribe

"What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible."

Theodore Roethke

"Let us say to each other: "May you walk among the stars and be
the creator of Universes!"

Devin Alaric Mikles, MD

"Humanity’s last and highest leave taking is leaving God for GOD!

Meister Eckhart

"Keep Breathing."

Sophie Tucker

JUMP!

Joseph Campbell

"Bread. A clean sky. Active peace. A woman’s voice singing
somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cook fires. The army
disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the
prisoner freed, the body’s integrity honored, the lover returned. The
magical skill that reads marks into meaning. The labor equal, fair and
valued. Delight in the challenge, for consensus to solve problems. No hand
raised in any gesture but greeting. Secure interiors-of heart, home, land-so
firm as to make secure borders irrelevant at last. And everywhere laughter,
care, celebration, dancing, contentment. A humble, earthly paradise, in the
now."

A Womans Creed

"I do hereby, willingly and consciously, declare myself to be
a Citizen of the World. As a World Citizen, I pledge my planetary civic
commitment to World Government, founded on three universal principles of One
Absolute Value, One World and One Humanity which constitute the basis of
World Law. As a World Citizen I acknowledge the World Government as having
the right and duty to represent me in all that concerns fundamental human
rights and General Good of humankind and the Good of All.

As a Citizen of World Government, I affirm my awareness of
my inherent responsibilities and rights as a legitimate member of the total
world community of all men, women and children, and will endeavor to fulfill
and practice these whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself.

As a Citizen of World Government, I recognize and re-affirm
citizenship loyalties and responsibilities within the communal, state and
/or national grouping consistent with the principles of unity above which
constitute now my planetary civic commitment."

"Do not be indifferent to your own survival and happiness. Examine
these ideas and words with the searing blade of your own conscience and
reason. They will stand even then. And do not hesitate for lack of
experience. This work is unprecedented in these modern times. Thus we are
all youths in this task. But experience can only be gained by living our
goal from the outset, by being members of the world community. And if we
stumble, falter, even fall, there are others to carry on, for the reality of
humanity's unity is a truth that cannot die."

Garry Davis

"Human affairs are not worthy of much seriousness, and yet one must
take them seriously."

-Plato, Laws,803b

PARADISE NOW!

Roberta Becky Quest

"Stand fast in the Unchangeable Life and Seed of God which was
before all changings and alterings were and which will remain when all that
is gone."